The Secret to Different Stages of Membership Development

Today’s session is about creating a simple membership portal on your website.

A lot of people have the opportunity to make a recurring income or add extra value to the database that they deal with, and to be able to do that … I’m just going to cut straight into it … you can simply create a simple membership portal.

I’m going to use a couple of demos, a very simple one and a high level, sophisticated one. So this one is about blogging and SEO. It’s a workshop I run, and have had a lot of attendees who get massive value out of it. Now, one of the things that I’m very mindful of when you’re creating these, especially if you’re doing a live workshop and then adding it as a private member’s area, is to make sure your work notes of the workshop line up with your membership area.

So this is using a simple page, in WordPress, that’s password protected. Now, this is a very simplistic model, so it’s using one password to protect the page, so everybody gets the same password. The issue with that is, if people share that, then other people, who shouldn’t have access, can get access. However, the whole point of today’s session is simply to do a proof-of-concept, because you don’t know how many people are actually interested in what you do, so you don’t want to invest thousands of dollars into creating a sophisticated level membership area. So this is a simple way to do that.

So it’s just a password-protected page. Now all I’ve used is simple tabs, so I’ve got my introduction to the session. When people are sitting down — and this can be done online, one-on-one, whatever your model is — you have your resources in there, and you simply scroll down. You have links, and you give people access to this, and they can simply click on the links — make sure your links open in a new window so they’re not taken off the page — and then I’ve broken mine down into my session one, session two, session three for my blogging and SEO workshop, and the last session, we talk about post-promotion, so once you’ve done a blog post, how are you actually going to promote it, get traffic, get the full SEO benefit from that?

I’ve also, then, one of the things with any workshop program is getting people to, number one, participate, because you want them get results from it. The better results people get, the more they’re going to brag about you, the more people are going to know about you, and the more likely you are to increase your membership.

I’ve created a 30-day challenge — I’m not going to show you this; you’ve got to pay to get into here — and then there’s a resources page. So there’s massive value in this. I created the program using Word — just everything was in Word — and then I transferred it across, and I simply created page tabs.

Now, I’m going to show you a page — how I created it — we use a WordPress building program called Smart Page Builder, and so to create tabs I simply use that, drag it across, and it creates these tabs, and then I can open that up, edit the tab titles, add page content, and so forth.

I’m not going to click through and do that, because I’m renowned for breaking things — my team reckon their position description is fixing my stuff-ups and go home feeling good about themselves — so let’s not do that, but if you’re not on Smart Page Builder platform, number one, we can either have a conversation and get you onto it, or number two, here’s a Shortcodes plugin that you can use. Now, Shortcodes Ultimate, we’ve tested this, used this for years, and it actually has a really simple page tab function. It’s actually pretty damn cool. Shortcodes Ultimate doesn’t conflict, generally, with other plugins. We’ve had a very, very good run on it, so if that’s your option, go for that. So hopefully that helps.

But Smart Page Builder is certainly fantastic, because there’s a lot of functionality in here, it can do all sorts of wonderful things, call to actions, call-outs, and so forth, report-ins, and so it goes on.

That is a simple membership platform setup, and it is my recommendation to do it that way … I’ll just go back to our original page … so my recommendation is to do it this way initially. A couple of benefits are that it actually helps you to collate all your information, to gather your thoughts, to set some structure up, because there’s a lot of information to gather together, and this is just a simple way to help you frame that up.

So I’ll go now, to another membership model we’ve set up. This is a little bit more sophisticated. This is for a business I run, a Smarter Business Profits, it’s called Smart Tank. It’s a mastermind work-shopping group, and this is the membership area. So now, this is a very high-level membership area. It has a dashboard, a member’s area, we have different courses — I’ll flick through to the courses now — an imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.

And that’s my whole point, and why I thought I’d share this, because I hear a lot of people theorize about running membership platforms, and it’s going to cost a thousand, two thousand whatever the number is, and rather than trying to look at financing it, just keep it simple to start with. You’ve got to go for proof of concept.

So, we’ve got two courses in here. This is a marketing program that we ran in 2017, and this is our current mastermind work-shopping group. Every month we meet; I’m able to add my key notes into the membership area, and we can actually set up resources within there.

I’m not going to go through to there. I will go through to here though. This is the marketing course that we ran last year, which is available, online, ongoing, obviously. Now this is basically the introduction of the course — blah, blah, blah — and if you go down here you can see we’ve got lessons set up, so Fast Start Guide, to help people get some runs on the board straight away, because if you’re going to invest in this you want to get some quick runs to cash up, and then we’ve broken everything down into modules. We’ve got ten modules. I’ll just jump into, say, one of the modules, and within this module there’s different topics, so there’s some lesson resources, business blog planning worksheet, and so on, and we’ve got these all labeled, and it’s pretty impressive. It’s pretty sexy.

And here’s the topics, and you can see there’s a menu down the side. So, module one, module two, and so it goes on, and if we just scroll down a bit, you can see, there, that that’s got a green tick on it, so that module’s been complete. And that’s the whole purpose of this, is that you increase people’s participation, so they’re actually going through, they’re reading your lesson topics, they’re ticking it off as complete, you can have conversations down here, so the whole thing is about participation. Getting people to complete, get value out of it. They’re going to basically be able to share it with other people.

Okay, what else? I’ll just flick back through, so over here, you can set up different achievements. You can sort of gamify it, where you can get scores, points, trophies, and all sorts of things. Communications, notifications, and there’s a central repository … I’ll just go through to the resources now, and you can see that the Smart Tank notes are in here. We were creating, within the group, a evergreen social media campaign. One session was about testimonials, and client reviews, and so it goes on.

So these are all the key notes and resources. You can see that you’re able to categorize and tag them, so this is a very high-level membership area, and the other thing, with — just on the passwords — with the passwords, this will self-generate, so it creates a unique password for each member, which can’t be shred, and if the member loses their password, it will re-generate a new password — it’ll do the lost password thing — which is fantastic, and that’s really important when you’ve got a high-level membership, because you don’t want to be laboring, creating people’s passwords, and you want to protect your intellectual property, and whereas the other model, it is a common password shared amongst all people, which you can update on a regular basis, but the whole point of sharing this model with you was that this gives you a start-up, cost effective, and it helps you to frame up your content.

So that’s Peter Butler from smarter websites. Now, if you think these business tips add value, please like this Facebook Live, love it, give me a thumbs up. Please share this on Facebook, make a comment, or tag a friend.

And if you need any help, make a comment. If you want to know more, if you want to have a conversation, if you want to run an idea by me, simply make a comment. I’m here to help, and if I can add value to your business then I’m adding value and we’re likely to do business one day, perhaps, and if not, doesn’t matter. You think highly of me, and you’re likely to refer me, and that’s the whole point of this, is for me to be able to add that value.

So, I hope that helps. Very short one today. Like to keep it short and sharp. So have a great weekend, and I will see you on the next Business Tips at Ten.

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Peter B Butler

Passionate with serial ‘hobbiest’ tendencies. Love WordPress & software 'toys'. Raving 70's Jap Bike collector. By day we convert dead dormant websites into profitable sites, hence ‘Smarter Websites’ - making them 'work', one at a time if necessary. On target for world domination, albeit our part of the world...

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